Reading list

'Tis the Season to Abolish the Family

What if we could do better than the family?

Verso Books20 November 2022

'Tis the Season to Abolish the Family

We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family. Even in so-called happy families, the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other is endless and exhausting. What if we could do better?

Do family abolitionists want to get rid of your Gran? Do they hate love? Are they all killjoys looking to rip the roots of working class resistance apart? Find out all this and more in this episode of the Verso podcast with author Sophie Lewis in conversation with Ben Smoke.

Until January 2, 2023 at 11:59PM EST, we have 40% off all print books and 60% off all ebooks (see full details here)!

See our Gift Guide and all our reading lists, including The Year in 10 BooksRadicalize Your NiblingsRadical HappinessTis the Season to Abolish the FamilyUnderstanding the Cost of Living CrisisChristianity and Anticapitalism.
 

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What if family were not the only place you might hope to feel safe, loved, cared for and accepted? What if we could do better than the family?

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The most influential theory of the origins of women’s oppression in the modern era, in a beautiful new edition.

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An integrated overview of the long transition from feudalism to capitalism, illuminating the far-reaching changes in familial relations from peasant subsistence to the making of the modern working class.

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Sensitive but uncompromising socialist-feminist critique of the nuclear family.

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Current debates about the future of the family are often based on serious misconceptions about its past. Arguing that there is no biologically mandated or universally functional family form, Stephanie Coontz traces the complexity and variety of family arrangements in American history.

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Taking collective responsibility for children would radically transform our notions of kinship, helping us to see that it always takes a village to make a baby.

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On the fraught bonds between daughters and their fathers, women and the patriarchy.

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“To mother is to murder, or close enough,” thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. A cat and mouse game of surveillance and psychological torment develops between a middle aged artist and her aging mother in Vigdis Hjorth’s latest novel.

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Godelier argues that the changes of the last thirty years do not herald the disappearance or death agony of kinship, but rather its remarkable metamorphosis—one that, ironically, is bringing us closer to the “traditional” societies studied by ethnologists.

Abolish the Family
What if we could do better than the family?We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonmen...
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

In this provocative and now-classic work, Friedrich Engels explores the interrelated development of the family and the state from ancient society to the Victorian era. Drawing on new anthropologica...
A Millennium of Family Change
How do changes in family form relate to changes in society as a whole? In a work which combines theoretical rigour with historical scope, Wally Seccombe provides a powerful study of the changing st...
The Anti-Social Family
Despite much talk of its decline, the nuclear family persists as a structure central to contemporary society, a fact to be lamented, according to the ideas of Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh. T...
Paperback
The Social Origins of Private Life
Current debates about the future of the family are often based on serious misconceptions about its past. Arguing that there is no biologically mandated or universally functional family form, Stepha...
Full Surrogacy Now
"Rooted in historical, site-based, narrative, and political accounts, Full Surrogacy Now is the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for. This kind of gestation depends on...
Daddy Issues
In this searching, elegant essay, critically acclaimed writer Katherine Angel examines the place of fathers in contemporary culture with her characteristic mix of boldness and nuance, asking how th...
Is Mother Dead

Is Mother Dead

**Longlisted for The International Booker Prize 2023**'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed a...
The Metamorphoses of Kinship

The Metamorphoses of Kinship

With marriage in decline, divorce on the rise and the demise of the nuclear family, it is clear that the structures of kinship in the modern West are in a state of flux.In The Metamorphoses of Kins...

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